From the series of Bleach details I got unnecessarily fixated on:
The scene where Grimmjow interrupts Loly and Menoly in bullying Orihime and then she heals them and the other three are in a complete mental block over why she’s doing it. Everything about that scene is puzzling— in neither a positive or negative way, it’s just weird and I can only guess whether it’s deliberate, but it’s more fascinating to think of it that way.
Orihime sparing or healing enemies is nothing new, she’s done it countless times from the very beginning of the series. I also take it as the main reason people keep saying she’s not equipped to participate in a fight; she doesn’t want to harm anyone and that makes it pretty difficult to win. It’s just that it’s never framed in such a contrasting way before the scene with Loly and Menoly. It’s taken for granted that she’s the One Highly Empathetic Character because it hasn’t caused problems before — but here, it potentially could. Not only to her friends who technically have two more enemies who could get in their way, but to Orihime herself considering these are people who hate her and want to harm her. And even when she gets lashed out at again, she continues to heal them, which is where it becomes evident that this is a pretty extreme conviction, a compulsion almost.
And that’s when the oddest part of all comes up, right at the end of the scene, when Loly calls Orihime a ‘monster’. (It’s not a weird translation either, she uses ‘bakemono’ from what I remember.) The first thing you’d think is that she just really wants to hate her and is being irrational with her insults, but it’s not about that. Throughout Orihime’s captivity in Hueco Mundo, the Arrancars’ attitude towards her varies between sadistic and utterly bewildered (sometimes the former as a consequence of the latter) because the way she acts is incomprehensible to them. They have to go through a whole series of mental gymnastics to fit her into their framework, like when Loly and Menoly hypothesize that she’s full of herself (because they would be in her position) or when Ulquiorra suggests she laugh at her friends’ foolishness for coming to save her (because it’s what he would do). And Orihime just doesn’t fit, because the experiences of a human girl create a vastly different attitude comparing to those of several hundred-year-old hollows who have just gained a level of consciousness.
They can look as similar to her as they want, they can dress her up in an Arrancar uniform, but the difference remains. A ‘monster’, to the average person, would be a creature whose behaviour escapes all levels of their understanding besides being immensely powerful, but the important part is fear of the unknown in the classic Lovecraftian sense. The concept of something immense enough that the brain can’t capture it, or that precisely falls outside its spectrum of perception. You can never control or predict something you can’t even process. Loly is terrified in that scene. Hollows and Arrancars are a sort of ‘inverted’ version of humans and shinigami and their views are also skewed in the opposite direction. Violence, destruction and greed they can understand, but not compassion; being confronted with an entity that can retroactively modify events by rejecting them and then uses this power for a bewildering purpose such as helping enemies and potentially digging her own grave is the same to them as when a human sees a hollow’s mercilessness.
And, back to Orihime — the one reason she can do this is because of her brother. That experience made her understand that hollows are just human souls in an extremely corrupted state, so she lacks the resolve to write them off as monsters. She knows the majority of them will never get it and that they’re incapable by nature of seeing others as humans do, she just doesn’t think it’s necessary. As she says later on, the ‘heart’ (which is the Bleach codeword for any interpersonal connection, really) is about reaching out and the willingness to understand and accept, it’s about the effort and not how similar two people’s feelings are. I don’t think Bleach takes a clear stance on whether this is right or wrong (many positive characters wouldn’t agree) but they are, at the very least, the same views Kaien has. She doesn’t have to care whether Loly and Menoly understand why she healed them, because the most she can do on her part is make the effort.
If she was just a random human, saw them as alien and hostile and got scared of them, that wouldn’t warrant a reaction. It’s because she’s trying to bridge an unbridgeable gap that she’s ‘monstrous’ to them; it transcends what they expect a human to be able to do.
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